Paul Harding's Advice on Writing: The Pulitzer Winner on Patience, Perception, and Prose as Music

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tinkers, his first novel. Before that, twenty-six publishers rejected it. A small press picked it up for a thousand-dollar advance. He is also the author of Enon and This Other Eden. Before he was a novelist, he was the drummer for the band Cold Water Flat. He teaches at Harvard.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, The Millions, and the No Film School interview series.

Write a Thousand Pages to Keep 150

Tinkers is roughly 190 pages. Harding wrote easily a thousand pages to get there. "I'll often write for a week or a month and write 150 pages and go, that's exactly what this is not about."

He does not consider this waste. It is process of elimination. "Sometimes you have to write your way to the best expression." The wrong version has to exist in a particular way before the right version can emerge. You cannot reason your way to the right sentence. You have to write the wrong sentence, understand specifically why it is wrong, and revise toward what you actually mean.

Every six to eight weeks, he prints the entire manuscript and reads it with a blue pen. By the time a book is published, he has read and revised it more times than he can count. When the publisher offered a chance to make changes before a reprint of Tinkers, he made roughly 250 corrections. Commas. Rhythms. One extra eighth note in a sentence that should not be there.

Prose as Music

Harding was a drummer before he was a writer, and he writes the way he played. "When you're the drummer, you're the timekeeper. You've got the tempo, but you can pull it back a little bit, you can push on it."

He often knows the tempo, rhythm, and beat of a sentence before he knows what it literally means. "I'll have the rhythm before I know the meaning." A passage about a door-to-door salesman in Tinkers came to him as pure rhythm first: "Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly just a mush, a mop and brush drummer." Monosyllabic. Punchy. A little swagger. He wanted it to feel like the character's own self-image - "a little bit more of a badass than he actually is."

But you have to be careful. Too much rhythm becomes singsong. Too many internal rhymes become cutesy. "You want to make it angular, a little choppy, but also kind of funky." The heartbeat should be there. The reader should not be counting beats.

This translates directly to pacing. In narrative fiction, you are writing about time. Time can slow down. Time can speed up. You can write in half-time or double-time. A scene of quiet observation needs a different tempo than a scene of crisis. The drummer knows this instinctively. The writer has to learn it.

Precision Creates Beauty

Harding spent years terrified that precise description would kill the beauty of his subject. He was writing about woods, light, heartbreak - the kind of material that invites lyrical excess. "I was writing kind of lyrical pastoral stuff, and if you're not really paying attention, it just turns into pretty ornamental rococo baloney."

Marilynne Robinson told him at Iowa: "You really need to learn how to write grammatically correct prose." It felt like the opposite of everything they had discussed. But it was the key.

When he committed to precision - describing exactly what light looks like as it changes under bare trees at 4:15 in the afternoon - something unexpected happened. "It turned into much more beautiful, astonishing writing." Not clinical. Not surgical. More beautiful because it was exact.

His goal for revision: "Perfect precision of expression." Not ornament. Not showing off. Getting each word exactly right. "That has been a great insurance policy against ornamentalism, because you're always trying to get it exactly right."

He applies what he calls "aesthetic pressure to the language," revising individual sentences roughly a hundred times in Tinkers. Not to decorate them. To strip them to their most precise form. The beauty is what remains after everything imprecise has been removed.

Don't Tell the Reader What to Think

"If somebody reads my book and gets what the point is, they never have to think about it again." Harding lives in terror of the question: what's the takeaway?

Lessons in fiction, he argues, tend to be tautological. "Be kind to strangers. Like, no kidding. I didn't need to read your book to get that." The alternative is recognition. The reader finishes a passage and thinks: "I've felt that. I've just never seen anybody put it in words before."

He thinks of his novels as galleries. "I'm just moving the reader through: look at that, here's this, here's that." If he told the reader what to think at the moment of recognition, "it would be absolute fraudulence. It would be the most violent thing you could do to the character, to the reader, to myself."

To describe something is not to explain it. To know something is not to understand it. Harding wants the reader to arrive at a moment and simply look. Not be told what they are seeing. Not be given a moral. Just: "Come here. Look what I found."

Write for the Dozen, Not the Billions

"The minute I write a sentence down, I can hear billions of people stampeding for the exits. But then there's a dozen people who come from the cheap seats down to the front row, and they say, 'Yeah, what happened next?' Those are the people you're writing your book for."

If you try to get everybody, you please no one. The readers who would have loved a transcendentalist novel think you pulled your punches. The readers who dislike transcendentalism think it still goes too far. "Give yourself over to writing the kind of book you'd like to read."

Harding's books are 200 pages long. He tries to make them 800 pages deep. "I would like my reader to leave my 200-page book feeling like they had something as substantive as War and Peace." He does not claim to have achieved this. But it is the target. Maximum density with maximum readability. "Every word should be apt. There's no showing off."

Improvise, Then Distill

Harding does not outline. He compares his process to Buster Keaton movies - stepping out into open space and trusting that a beam will appear. "I just love seeing what language gives me and what experience gives me."

But this is not a prescription. "One of the dangers of being a teacher is modeling what works for you as being normative." He tells students to observe themselves as writers and figure out what works for them. His method is improvisation because he has the temperament for it. Another writer might need an outline. The point is self-awareness, not imitation.

His own improvisation works through association. A character's patterns of association become how he gets character onto the page. One character thinks in certain verbs, notices certain colors, gravitates toward certain metaphors. No other character uses that repertoire. The associations accumulate over years of writing. "Live with them. What is that like to you? What would you say? What do you know?"

The Dark Nights

"Being an artist is one of the few professions where your job every day is to sit down and confront your own limitations." You are always asking: how can I make that better? How can I express that more precisely? You never cruise on what you already know.

The work gets harder as you improve. But "the harder it is, the more precious it is when you think: I got it. I chased it down into the language."

Twenty-six rejections for a novel that won the Pulitzer. Fifteen years of writing before publication. The wall is real. Sometimes the wall is not there, and you walk through. Sometimes you spend months staring at it. Harding's only advice for those moments: slow down. Be patient. Keep writing.

Key Takeaways

• Write far more than you keep. A thousand pages for 150 is not waste. It is how you find the book.
• Listen for the music in your sentences. Tempo, rhythm, dynamics - prose has all of these.
• Precision creates beauty. Exact description is more astonishing than ornamental language.
• Never tell the reader what to think. Describe the experience. Let recognition do the rest.
• Write for the dozen who lean forward, not the billions who leave.
• Confront your limitations daily. The difficulty is the craft.

Harding's revision obsession - 250 changes to a published novel, a hundred passes on a single sentence - is the kind of work that benefits from seeing exactly what changed and why. Athens shows you every edit as a diff, so you can chase precision the way Harding does: one word at a time, accepting only what gets closer to exactly right.

This post draws from Harding's appearance on How I Write and his interview in The Millions. For another writer obsessed with language's musicality, see Dean Koontz's writing advice.